Beyond Snakes and Shamrocks: St. Patrick’s Missional Leadership Lessons for Today

By Ross A. Lockhart and Darrell L. Guder

Somewhere in the mists of time, between history and hagiography, stands the great evangelist and missionary St. Patrick. Raised a "cultural Christian," Patrick's encounter with God during captivity in Ireland transformed his life and the history of a people. Freedom from slavery, and a return home to Britain, produced the divine summons--Vox Hibernia--to return to Ireland and the place of captivity in order to witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Christian witness in twenty-first-century Vancouver, Seattle, or Portland is a world away from fifth-century Armagh, Slane, or Cashel. Yet, the great evangelist to pre-Christian peoples of Hibernia has much to teach us as we seek to engage our secular, post-Christian context. There is wisdom in the missional leadership of the one we call St. Patrick that goes well beyond tales of snakes and shamrocks. How might Patrick's mission experience with pre-Christian peoples direct our contemporary missional encounter with post-Christian peoples? Come explore the story of the shepherd slave turned shepherd of souls and discover that there is power still in the legacy of Patrick, when yoked with the Spirit-filled presence and purpose of the risen Christ.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jul 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532634987

Ross A. Lockhart

Ross A. Lockhart is Associate Professor at St. Andrew's Hall at The University of British Columbia. He is the founding Director of the Centre for Missional Leadership and author of Gen X, Y Faith? (2002) and coeditor of Three Ways of Grace (2009).

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Beyond Snakes and Shamrocks

St. Patrick’s Missional Leadership Lessons for Today

Ross A. Lockhart

foreword by Darrell L. Guder

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Beyond Snakes and Shamrocks

St. Patrick’s Missional Leadership Lessons for Today

Copyright © 2018 Ross A. Lockhart. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978–1-5326–3497–0

hardcover isbn: 978–1-5326–3499–4

ebook isbn: 978–1-5326–3498–7

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Lockhart, Ross A., author. | Guder, Darrell L., foreword.

Title: Beyond snakes and shamrocks : St. Patrick’s missional leadership lessons for today / Ross A. Lockhart.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018 | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: isbn 978–1-5326–3497–0 (paperback) | isbn 978–1-5326–3499–4 (hardcover) | isbn 978–1-5326–3498–7 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Patrick, Saint, 373?–463? | Mission of the church—Canada. | Mission of the church—United States. | Christianity—21st century.

Classification: bv2070 .l4 2018. (print) | bv2070 .l4 (ebook)

Scripture quotations marked NRSV are taken from the Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™ Scripture quotations marked THE MESSAGE. Copyright © by Eugene H. Peterson 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 04/30/18

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1: Bannaventa Berniae

Chapter 2: Slemish

Chapter 3: Uillula

Chapter 4: Auxerre

Chapter 5: Saul

Chapter 6: Slane

Chapter 7: Cashel

Chapter 8: Armagh

Chapter 9: Monasterboice

Chapter 10: Ail

Chapter 11: Croagh Patrick

Chapter 12: Downpatrick

Discussion Questions

Further Reading

For Emily, Jack, and Sadie,

a threefold blessing

from our Triune God.

Foreword

Darrell L. Guder

Paradigm Shift has become a much used term in conversations about the rapid and radical changes that continue to shape Western cultures. The term is useful because the subject matter of these conversations has become so complex and multi-dimensional. For the sake of cogent communication, we need a term that summarizes what is going on. The concept of paradigm appears to capture the vast structural shape of this passage of cultural change. The basic frameworks of Western thought and practice are not only under review, they are profoundly threatened and are being replaced by entirely new sets of assumptions to guide our sense of who we are and where we are in the adventure of Western cultures. Until very recently, we could talk about Western culture and Christian culture and assume that we were talking more or less about the same thing. The dominant paradigm, after centuries of a history we describe as Christendom, privileged the Christian faith. Every aspect of Western culture was profoundly shaped by the shared legacy of Christianity. The language about the emerging paradigms that are rapidly replacing hegemonic Christendom focuses on terms like secularization, post-Christianity or post-Christendom, rationalism, progress, globalization, enlightenment, humanism, skepticism, and reliance upon science. There is no question that Bonhoeffer was right when he recognized that contemporary Western cultures see themselves as having come of age and now capable of consciously moving beyond the intellectual and culture immaturity of pre-modernity. Of the paradigms available, the inherited assumptions of Christianity are widely dismissed as no longer viable. The snakes and shamrocks of fifth-century Ireland are relics of a closed chapter, for which the paradigm of modernity has no place.

This comprehensive process of paradigm shift has, of course, radically reshaped the Christian mission. With the disintegration of the structures and stances of Christendom, the purpose of the Christian movement has been subjected to intense scrutiny. The outcome, for much of the intellectual establishment of the West, has been the unquestioned consensus that Christendom is over. Whatever the Christian mission was about in earlier centuries, it is no longer germane today. What is needed are new paradigms that focus upon the human capacity to address all challenges of life and survival on our planet. The intellectual world of Western modernity is generating a whole spectrum of such paradigms that are predominantly negative about the Christian legacy and its alleged mission.

This means that the interpreters of that mission today face a daunting task when they continue to claim that the events surrounding the person of Jesus Christ in the middle East in the first century of the common era are as revolutionary and powerful now as they were then. The Christian witnesses of that first century confronted hostile paradigms when they began to cross borders and share their message with more and more cultures of their day. They grappled with the scorn and derision of the dominant paradigm then, just as followers of Christ do today. The paradigms generated by human societies then and now are rarely cordial to the biblical message; they are challenged by it.

Going back to its initiation in the first century, the Christian mission has been guided by the first Christians’ conviction that their purpose was defined by the words of their ascending Lord: You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). The original company of Christian missionaries were graduates of the Rabbi Jesus’ school for disciples, learners of Jesus, who discovered after Easter that their vocation was to be his sent ones—apostles. Their sentness meant that they were constantly challenging the dominant paradigms of their context because Jesus Christ was Lord—and no other. This made them necessarily bi-cultural: they lived in the basic paradigm of God’s inbreaking reign in Jesus Christ. And they were called and sent to be evidence of that reign in a world profoundly opposed to such a message. Their witness centered on their translation of the truth of the biblical paradigm into cultural contexts defined by opposing paradigms.

Ross Lockhart is assuming the end of Christendom and the challenges of radical paradigm shift in this study. He is working with the vocabulary of the missional church, a theological discourse that in the last several decades has taken seriously the secularization of formerly Christian western Christendom and the reclamation of the fundamental missionary calling of the church. His theological assumptions echo David Bosch’s interpretation of our present day reality as paradigm shift in mission theology. But this shift is to be engaged as the challenge not to reject but to transform mission which will mean that we are to be transformed by mission. This is the thrust of Bosch’s magisterial work, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shift in Mission Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011). This means that we learn to do our theologies of the Christian mission as an alternative paradigm to what our cultural context seeks to impose upon us. The easy compromises and dilutions of centuries of churchly cooperation with culture are now replaced by the hard and challenging task of faithful witness in cultures whose dominant paradigms want to render that witness voiceless.

As the missional theological project continues to expand and deepen, it becomes rapidly clear that an essential aspect of this exploration is precisely the question: How do we relate, as post-Christendom Christian witnesses, to the centuries of Christendom that precede us? It’s an enormously important question, because we are still profoundly shaped by that legacy. Christendom still flavors the water in which we swim. The idea that there is such a thing as a Christian state or society still spooks around in our heads. It should not surprise us that there are still well-meaning attempts to put prayer back in schools, the Ten Commandments on the walls of courthouses, and Christ back into Christmas.

By proposing that we encounter St. Patrick as a mentor of Christian witness in the realities of fifth-century Ireland, Lockhart challenges one of the most tempting distortions to enter into our grappling with the end of Christendom. It is very easy, from the perspective of post-Christendom paradigms, to assume that God has been absent from this long and complicated history we call Christendom. It’s as though we were to agree that the Holy Spirit left Western history somewhere around 100 A.D. and just returned with the emergence of our particular group or sect. Such a reading of the story makes it possible to dismiss Christendom as a misbegotten distortion of Christianity. And there is plenty in that history to support such a judgment. We inherit from Christendom a myriad of reductionisms, distortions, and cultural captivities of the gospel for which we are held accountable. We dare not try to avoid dealing with that confused history. However, to dismiss the entire history of Western Christendom as irrelevant to us today is ultimately an heretical approach. It is questioning the promised presence of God in out world and history. It is denying that Jesus meant it when he said, Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the Age (Matt 28:20). It is fail to see that the gospel message was, in fact, proclaimed, heard, responded to, and obeyed in one cultural context after another and in response to constant challenges. We are Christians today because the monks of Christendom faithfully copied out that written legacy over the centuries, and missionaries like Patrick claimed the biblical vision of mission and allowed it to shape them and their actions in Ireland and beyond.

What we need to learn to do is to read our Christendom history dialectically. It is a very human story with ample evidence of our frailty and rebellion. But it is also God’s story interacting inextricably with our own, God’s faithfulness asserting itself in spite of our rebellion, God’s kindness revealing itself when we deserved only pity and punishment. Throughout the intervening centuries, we benefit from the testimony of remarkable Christian witnesses who are truly serving as Christ’s letter to the world (2 Cor 3:2–3). We don’t encounter this cloud of witnesses in spiritual isolation from human weakness and sinfulness, but constantly interacting with it. The great saints of the church are all forgiven sinners, but as such, they are often wonderful instruments of God’s healing work and God’s hopeful promises at work in our communities.

This is, I think, one of the chief theological gifts of Ross Lockhart’s work: his exposition of Patrick’s life and ministry serves us as a guide for how to deal with the contradictions and tensions of Christendom. We read these accounts both gratefully and warily, sensitive to God’s presence at work and equally sensitive to human dilutions of the divine word. As we learn to do that, we make wonderful discoveries: liturgical resources of great beauty and profound spirit, practices of neighborliness that teach us faithful witness, artistic representations of gospel truths in the work of Irish sculptors and architects. It is no wonder that there has been in the last decades a major rediscovery of Celtic spirituality. At its best these practices are truly concrete examples of the equipping of the saints for the work of service (Eph 4:10).

The human-divine chemistry of the Irish paradigm of mission includes the admixture of the historically reliable and the hagiographical. It is a delicate task to read and receive appreciatively and yet also critically. That is always the challenge when we are seeking to come to terms with the Christendom legacy and its particular problems for us who now live after Christendom. There is much that we would like to know about Patrick and his companions that the sources do not tell us. And there is a great deal of human imagination that has worked creatively to fill in some of those historical gaps. It is more appropriate preparation for faithful witness to learn here, as well, to read and receive the stories dialectically. The human and the divine are woven together, and we cannot ultimately separate them any more than we should disentangle the roots of the weeds from those of the good wheat in Jesus’ parable (Matt 13:24–30).

As the reader will learn from this book, Patrick’s spiritual journey begins in the Christendom of his day, and in many ways, his conversion to his apostolic vocation comes together with his insight into the problems of that Christendom. Thus, his missionary witness in Ireland is coupled with a vision and practice of Christian community that is one of the great missional gifts for all times. He is genuinely a renewer of the Christian church. So, Patrick’s mission is not adequately summarized by references to snakes and shamrocks. It is about discovery leading to conversion, and out of conversion to the practice of Christian witness that results in the expansion of the Christian mission across Ireland and over to Scotland and ultimately northern Europe. On the remote fringes of fifth-century Europe, God’s Spirit claims a man and shapes him through a difficult life story to serve as a witness and an equipper of witnesses to the gospel of God’s redeeming love in Jesus Christ. And at the heart of this missional pilgrimage we find remarkable examples of the revival of the ancient apostolic mission, now in forms that relate sensitively and obediently to the world into which God sent Patrick and his company.

The history of western Christendom has many stories like this that merit our attention. As the paradigm shift from western Christendom to post-Christian secularism continues, we need to rediscover these remarkable chapters of missional faithfulness, not just out of historical interest, but as crucial resources for our own equipping to be, do, and say faithful witness to the good news of Jesus Christ’s reign.

Preface

Patrick’s Moonlit Blessing

The names of a land show the heart of the race;

they move on the tongue like the lilt of a song. . . .

Even suppose that each name were freed from legend’s ivy

and history’s moss, there’d be music still in, say, Carrick-a-rede.

—John Hewitt, Ulster Names

For hundreds of years my ancestors have farmed the same plot of land, in the rolling green hills in the north of Ireland. My roots are intimately tied up with generations of kinfolk who defined their lives by six day a week farming, good wholesome craic on Saturday nights, and Sunday Sabbath keeping as only stoic Presbyterians know how. Whenever I return home to our family farm, I am always amazed by the powerful and enduring witness of this deep pastoral practice—the country rhythm, the ebb and flow of rural life marked by cow milking, sheep tending, God honoring and neighbor-caring relationships.

Down the road from the Lockhart family farm sits the wee town of Markethill. From the steps of our Presbyterian church, you hear the muffled sound of cars whizzing by on the A28, heading north past Gosford Park and through a verdant landscape dotted with bleating sheep, only minutes away from the heart of the ecclesiastical capital of all Ireland—Armagh. Visitors to this off-the-beaten-path city first catch a glimpse of the community through the sight of church spires rising in the distance that mark the location of two massive cathedrals that each bear the same name—one Protestant and the other Catholic. Both places of worship are named after Patricius, the kidnapped shepherd turned missionary disciple, known today as St. Patrick. The story of this first Bishop of Armagh in 444 AD, with its truth located somewhere between history and hagiography, is well known around the world, including his famous object lesson for the Trinity—the three leaf clover. Now, whether Patrick ever actually used plant life to try and explain the Triune God to ordinary people is doubtful. Rather, it leaves one to ponder what metaphor Patrick, the great missionary to a pre-Christian people, would have us reach for in our post-Christendom context today. What many of us can agree on, however, is that we could most certainly use his help. For today in North America from congregations to coffee shops, presbyteries to playgrounds, seminaries to supper tables there is a need for St. Patrick’s confident witness in firmly confessing Threeness of Persons, Oneness of Godhead, Trinity blest.

In the Pacific Northwest of North America in particular, the unraveling of Christendom has become evident throughout the region known as Cascadia. Census data on both sides of the border is clear that no religion is now the number one religion in the region.¹ Tina Block’s historical survey of faith in Cascadia found that Northwest secularity is most evident in the region’s strikingly low levels of involvement in, and attachment to, formal or organized religion.² Some believe that the quick pace of that unraveling in Oregon, Washington State, and British Columbia is due, in part, to the reality that Christendom was never fully established here compared to back east.³ Whatever the reason, Cascadia is proving to be fertile ground for sowing seeds of missional leadership that takes seriously Lesslie Newbigin’s vision that the West has become the new mission field. Newbigin declared that today Christians are forced to do something that we have not had to do since the birth of the church, namely to discover the "form and substance of a missionary church in terms that are valid in a world that has rejected the power and influence of the Western nations. Missions will no longer work along the stream of expanding Western power. They have to learn to go against the stream."⁴

For over 1,500 years Christianity enjoyed a privileged place in Western society. From Emperor Constantine’s embrace (or perhaps we might say domestication) of the Christian Church in the fourth century A.D., followers of Jesus have lived within a larger culture that granted Christianity and its leaders access to power and a seat at the mainstream cultural table. Describing the reality of Christendom, Missiologist Stephan Paas suggests that the average person in the West:

would be baptized as a child, and he or she would grow up in a society where everything expressed and confirmed religious belief. A certain number of these Christians would be active in their local parish, study the Scriptures, and maintain a life of prayer and good works. Many others would be fairly inactive, but they would be counted as Christians nonetheless.⁵

In a recent conversation with Stephan Paas at Princeton Theological Seminary, he suggested to me that a helpful way of understanding Christendom identity is to think in terms of how people view democracy in the West today. For example, even though not everyone eligible to vote turns out to cast a ballot, some in society would struggle to name the major politicians of the day, and even fewer citizens hold formal membership in a political party, yet the majority would absolutely endorse democracy as a necessary worldview. In a similar way, Christendom Christianity may not have required an active knowledge of, or participation in Christian belief and practice, but there was still a nominal sense of connection with Christian identity.

For many in our churches, they can still remember a time growing up in Canada or the United States where this Christendom reality was commonplace. In the twentieth century, however, secularization began to move throughout the Western world, slowly eroding the church’s privileged place in society. What does this look like? Canadian scholar Charles Taylor observes that in the West, the shift to secularity . . . consists . . . of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.⁶ Today, one of the most rapidly growing segments of the North American population is people with little to no knowledge of Christian teachings or practice.⁷ What might this look like in a typical community across the West?

Very secularized nations are characterized by low and decreasing levels of church attendance, low and decreasing levels of other types of church involvement (baptism, church weddings, Christian funerals, etc) widespread lack of belief in traditional Christian doctrines (a personal God, the divinity of Jesus Christ, heaven and hell, etc.), a general indifference towards traditional religious questions (apatheism) and cultural elites that are often quite critical of religion and religious institutions.⁸

Therefore, if we are no longer in the era of Western Christendom then surely our ministerial leadership of Christian witnessing communities must look, feel, and sound different from when we were in that